When Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock first started making music together, close to six decades ago, a large proportion of the British music scene was pretending to be something it wasn’t. Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis were inspiring Tom Jones and everyone else to sing in a transatlantic accent.
But when Chas & Dave started playing together, in the early 1970s, they made a clear decision to – as Hodges would later put it to a television documentary maker – “sing in our own accents, sing songs about who we were, and where we were from”.
From this choice came a sound that, in the decades since, has flooded hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives with pure, unadulterated, toe-tapping, hip-swinging, lyric-shouting joy. But it has also left them misunderstood. Chas Hodges was a supreme musician. He learnt the piano as a session musician, gazing over the shoulder of Jerry Lee Lewis.
The cockney wail that rings out over, say, “Ain’t No Pleasin’ You”, has left many part-time listeners imagining the duo to be some kind of pub-singing novelty act, an East End version of The Wurzels. They were – and the use of the past tense here has summoned the tears again – absolutely nothing of the sort.
As recently as April this year they were collaborating with Pete Doherty (one of their biggest fans) and The Libertines, as they had done with Jools Holland, Eric Clapton and all manner of others. They were from northeast London, a time and a place that is as consistently mythologised as it misunderstood. They came from a land of jellied eels and pie and mash and pearly kings and queens that never quite existed. If it had done, there would be Chas & Dave songs about it: but there aren’t.
Instead they sung the poetry of everyday life, with a music that is as infectious as anything that’s ever been sung.
“You won’t stop talkin’/ Why don’t you give it a rest?/ You’ve got more rabbit than Sainsbury’s/ It’s time you got it off your chest.”
One of my most treasured memories of recent years is seeing my little nephews, two and five years old, erupting with the same joy as the rest of their family at the first bars of “Rabbit”, and instantly demanding it be played again. Such demands are now a daily occurrence, including, I am told, this morning, in between Chas's death and its announcement.
